I really enjoyed the original _Kingsman: The Secret Service_ (2015). It took itself just seriously enough to poke fun at the spy thriller genre, but with tongue firmly in cheek. Though over-the-top in parts, it never went too far. The story stayed grounded enough to be an effective genre buster. Come for the action, stay for the riffs on James Bond.

_Kingsman: The Golden Circle_, though… There's a certain irony to this film's "Manners maketh man" scene, considering how poor its characters' manners are. The words "fuck", "shit", and so on absolutely litter the script. Sometimes a single line of dialogue manages to cram in half a dozen. I'm not sure even a single character escaped the "Fuck" train. Pretty much everyone seems to say it at least once.

Honestly, the writing just came across as lazy. That's yet another irony, because I'm sure the writers were working harder than ever trying to repeat the first film's formula and create a worthy sequel. Sadly, they failed. Cursing doesn't make a joke funny—unless it's already funny, then _maybe_ a well-timed "Fuck!" can restart the giggles when they begin to subside.

The film's treatment of its female characters didn't help my opinion, either. Everyone doing anything of the "saving the world" variety was a man. Now, I'm a man too, and one of the things I really appreciated about 2015's _Kingsman_ film was Roxy. I thought having a female spy working alongside Eggsy et al was part of the genre-busting, given that women usually only get "damsel in distress" roles in classic spy flicks. But in this go-around, Roxy isn't part of the picture ([spoiler]she's taken out along with all the other Kingsman agents near the beginning[/spoiler]) and I'm afraid Ginger Ale—Halle Berry's real character name \*gag\*—couldn't make up for that.

All of this—plus the cheap-looking CGI—made for a very long 141 minutes.

Allegedly, the next Kingsman film (due out next year) won't even have Eggsy in it. This film [spoiler]killed off Merlin[/spoiler]. I'm not sure what results the producers are expecting by replacing basically the entire core cast, considering what happened after they dumped most of them already for this go-around. I'll probably still watch the next film, but I expect it will be as bad as this one, if not worse.